“With Salesforce, we have empowered our customer service team to handle more day-to-day transactions, so we can protect service continuity and free up our financial advisors to focus on selling and giving customers great advice”

Morten has banked with Spar Nord for years, and has built up a great relationship with his personal advisor Christina, who has helped to arrange his overdraft, mortgage, and a loan. But if Christina is on holiday, Morten can still expect the same seamless service from another rep, who has his full up-to-the-minute customer history in front of them, and can give him the same personalised experience that makes him feel valued.

“With Salesforce, we have empowered our customer service team to handle more day-to-day transactions, so we can protect service continuity and free up our financial advisors to focus on selling and giving customers great advice,” said Dan Sletten, Project Manager at Spar Nord.

As the fifth largest bank in Denmark, home-grown Spar Nord has been blazing a trail in the banking sector since 1824 and now has a network of 50 branches, with 400,000 private and retail customers. It has 1,500 employees, and with the increasing popularity of web and mobile banking, is moving away from multiple smaller branches in favour of larger, centralised hubs and a virtual connection with customers.

In fact, Spar Nord estimates that most customers only need between five and seven physical meetings with bank staff throughout their lives. “We are competing with more and more startups offering digital services, and whereas once customers would bank for life, now people are shopping around to get the best deals,” said Sletten.

To attract and retain more customers, Spar Nord needs to ensure it can continue offering personalised banking services as it scales: and with surveys showing its customers are some of the most satisfied in Denmark, the bank has a reputation of excellence to protect.

Spar Nord decided to shift its focus from transactions to interactions, but to do that, it needed to transform its CRM system. In 2017 it went to market, and selected Salesforce after a series of workshops and successful demonstrations proved it was the best solution to help it realise its ambitions.

“We want to be ‘The Personal Bank in a Digital World’ so need to find the perfect balance between our digital and physical channels, using all the available data to make our customer interactions even more personal and relevant,” said Ole Madsen, Senior Vice President, Communication and Business Development at Spar Nord. “Salesforce is the tool best fitted to help us meet these objectives.”

“With Salesforce, we have unlocked a full 360-degree view of the customer journey,” added Sletten. Financial Services Cloud integrates with the bank’s backend infrastructure to connect banking details to customer records and track interactions. It is also digitalising slow manual processes. Setting up and conducting a customer meeting, which involves sending an invitation and the agenda, sharing meeting notes with the customer, and triggering a customer satisfaction survey, will soon all be managed in Salesforce.

“We want to be ‘The Personal Bank in a Digital World’ so need to find the perfect balance between our digital and physical channels, using all the available data to make our customer interactions even more personal and relevant, Salesforce is the tool best fitted to help us meet these objectives.”

Instead of doing a big bang implementation, Spar Nord identified a small team in customer service who started using Salesforce to build cases in response to customer emails. This was rapidly scaled up to three more teams over the following months, and ultimately the bank hopes to onboard around 800 users across 50 branches. “Our staff love how intuitive Salesforce is. They have picked it up really easily and are already asking us to add more functionality,” said Sletten.

Financial Services Cloud will roll out to personal advisors by mid-2019 who will then have an overview of customer accounts, and can handle leads from new customers better.

Spar Nord receives up to 1,500 messages each day through web and mobile banking, split between its customer service and advisor service teams. With Financial Services Cloud, the customer service team can now handle a larger volume of queries; each agent previously had a target of about 30-40 messages a day, but Sletten is confident this will rise by up to 50%.

Messages are now prioritised and automatically routed to staff and Salesforce can track the volume of incoming messages. By displaying this information in dashboards for the management team, they can ensure reps are performing well and responding to customers in a timely manner.

“Salesforce streamlines our processes as we can see how everyone is working throughout the day and make sure we are as productive as possible, while also being able to deliver the best possible service to our customers,” said Sletten.

Customer service agents are also using QuickText to access a library of standard texts to answer common queries in just two clicks, which is faster and more efficient than copying and pasting responses from Word documents. Further down the road it will provide customers with completely automated written responses to standard queries, freeing up the team to handle more complex cases.

To get closer to its customers, the company is also using Marketing Cloud, and sends out regular messages, such as seasonal greetings texts. “We also aim to increase our customer base by 10% each year, and Marketing Cloud is helping us to get stronger leads,” explained Sletten.

When subscribers receive the bank’s monthly newsletter, Marketing Cloud is helping the team to track prospects’ interests by logging which articles and links are being clicked on. For example, a subscriber clicking on links relating to buying a car might be interested in car loans – and if the prospect is already a customer, the bank can see whether they have purchased car loans from the bank before and can tailor the conversation to make it more relevant.

Building better marketing campaigns is also key to winning new business. “With Salesforce we get more insights into the relation between campaigns, leads and customer conversion,” Sletten revealed. “This helps us create more targeted campaigns, which will hopefully mean higher conversion rates with less effort.”

Leads coming through its Facebook page will be routed directly into Salesforce where a customer service rep can quickly and easily set up a meeting with an advisor. “While internal efficiencies are mostly making life easier for our staff, we are also being more proactive and responsive to customers,” said Sletten.

As the bank continues its digital transformation, it wants to empower its customers with more self-service capabilities and online resources underpinned by Salesforce to help them find the information they need faster. “With Salesforce, we can deliver the personalised and digital experience our customers expect even as we scale,” said Sletten. “With more efficient and personal services, we can safeguard our reputation as one of Denmark’s leading banks as we focus on our growth ambitions.”

Based in Denmark, Spar Nord was first established in 1824 and is the country’s fifth largest bank with a network of 50 branches, primarily in the north of the country. It has 400,000 private and retail customers and employs 1,500 staff.

Founded in 1999, Salesforce, the Customer Success Platform and the world’s #1 CRM company, empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way. Based on a foundation of cloud, social, mobile and data science technologies, the Salesforce Customer Success Platform is unique in the industry. It allows companies to grow sales faster, deliver customer service everywhere, create 1:1 marketing journeys, engage with customers in interactive communities, deliver analytics for every business user and create custom apps that run on any device.